Interview Style

A recent article about Apple’s interview questions was really interesting which got me thinking — as a manager, I’ve never been asked questions like this before during an interview. I ask the typical questions about who you are, where you’ve been and what are you up to now. I’ll usually ask a few questions to make the interviewee think, such as what is your favorite excel formula and why? Or ask them to describe a situation that had conflict and see how they resolved it. But it dawned on me that there is a whole other creative way to glean information from a candidate and Apple seems to have it down pat. There are some pretty challenging questions in this article. How would you answer them?

Following are some of them:

“We have a cup of hot coffee and a small cold milk out of the fridge. The room temperature is in between these two. When should we add milk to coffee to get the coolest combination earliest (at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end)?” —Product Design Engineer candidate

“How much does the Empire State Building weigh?” — Solutions Consultant candidate

“How do you check if a binary tree is a mirror image on left and right sub-trees?” – Research scientist candidate

“What superhero would you be and why?” – Retail candidate

“Explain what RAM is to a five year old.” — Apple Genius candidate

“How does an airplane wing work?” — Lead Systems Engineer candidate

“Draw the inside architecture of an iPhone” — Hardware Test Design Lead candidate

“Give me 5 ways of measuring how much gasoline is in a car.” — Hardware Engineering candidate

“If you have 2 eggs, and you want to figure out what’s the highest floor from which you can drop the egg without breaking it, how would you do it? What’s the optimal solution?” — Software Engineer candidate

“How would you break down the cost of this pen?” — Global Supply Manager candidate

“Describe an interesting problem and how you solved it.” — Software Engineer candidate

“Explain to an 8 year old what a modem/router is and its functions.” — At-Home Advisor candidate

“How many children are born every day?” — Global Supply Manager candidate

“You have a 100 coins laying flat on a table, each with a head side and a tail side. 10 of them are heads up, 90 are tails up. You can’t feel, see or in any other way find out which side is up. Split the coins into two piles such that there are the same number of heads in each pile.” — Software Engineer candidate

“There are three boxes, one contains only apples, one contains only oranges, and one contains both apples and oranges. The boxes have been incorrectly labeled such that no label identifies the actual contents of the box it labels. Opening just one box, and without looking in the box, you take out one piece of fruit. By looking at the fruit, how can you immediately label all of the boxes correctly?” — Software QA Engineer candidate

“Scenario: You’re dealing with an angry customer who was waiting for help for the past 20 minutes and is causing a commotion. She claims that she’ll just walk over to Best Buy or the Microsoft Store to get the computer she wants. Resolve this issue.” — Specialist candidate